May 28, 2014

it's time!!

guys. it's time. the time is here. its today. its happening.

after 18 months of serving an lds mission in taiwan,my best friend patrisha is coming home today!!!!

and this is how i feel about it.

the past year and a half has been hard. i feel like she has been gone for 10 years. getting married without her with me has been particularly rough. before taran came along, patrisha was my other half. she knows what i'm thinking. i can say "oh that dude! from that one thing!" and she says, "yes!! man, he was hot." we are inseparable. i call her mom "mom", i have spent countless hours at her house, almost every fun memory that i have she was with me.

missions are hard. not just for the missionary, but for those they left behind. you can't skype everyday or talk on the phone. missionaries are only allowed to talk to their families on mother's day and christmas day. you can email a missionary, but each missionary only gets 30 minutes of computer time a week, so it can't be a long email. you can write them letters, snail mail letters, but with patrisha all the way in taiwan, our letters took at least two weeks to get to each other. so i would write something that was going on, she would write back and i would say "oh, that was forever ago, i forgot about that."

i have stayed up late on sunday nights this past 18 months because that is when she had her computer time. that way, we could email back and forth a little bit and have an actual conversation. it has been hard as she missed my wedding and i wasn't there to comfort her when she was hit by a truck and her appendix exploded. i still don't know what happened when she got hit by a truck. i still don't know the story. but i did get to skype with her when she was in the hospital for her appendix, (skype meaning her mom called me, put me on facetime and held the phone up to her computer so i could see her. technologyyyyyyy). and she was allowed to call her family because it was a serious situation with her being in the hospital.

why do missionaries have such strict rules, you may ask? they just don't want to get distracted. they are to be completely 100% focused on the work of sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ. these rules prevent them from getting distracted. there was a time when i was sharing too much about my engagement that patrisha asked me to stop talking about it. it was too distracting for her.

i'm a little worried that we will have changed so much in the past 18 months that we won't fit together and we won't be friends anymore. it's been a long time, we have both changed. she has never even met my husband!! but we have decided we just need to patient with each to fall back into our groove. so that's what we will do.

i will be heading home on friday to see her and expect a phone call from her tonight!!!!! i cannnot WAIT! exciting things!! if you need me, i will be re-enacting the gif above.